Catherine’s creepy anime graphics and extreme difficulty are apparently not too much for American gamers after all – the game has received a series of ringing endorsements from US gaming rags, some as high as 100%.

For those wondering, the actual game easily escaped censorship (Japanese game censorship is rather more draconian than western standards, save where it comes to crazed child pornography laws), and the Bowdlerised cover is only in restricted circulation.

In other news, Catherine has also secured a European publisher and will at some point be reaching the barbarous wastes of Europe – happily Catherine is, as 2ch would have it, “an old hag” so further interference seems unlikely.

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I played it without the patch, as I have bought the original japanese version for Xbox360.
First of all – it wasn’t that hard. Yeah, I did kick my bookshelf when I couldn’t solve a level, but I have still been able to make it to the one of the Catherine endings after about 2 weeks.
Well, I played it on hard, and never complained. The game is good, when it’s hard as hell. Especially if it’s a puzzle game.
I do advise to buy japanese version, cause Atlus makes nearly the worst dubs in the world.
The worst are russian anime fandubs, by the way.

I found this game highly enjoyable. The game wasn’t too hard in the original Japanese version, though. I felt the patch was very stupid, since you basically got unlimited continues.

The difficulty level was just right until the last few stages, where I felt I was getting killed by pure randomness quite a few times (like the moving blocks moving away the second you try to jump to them).

I give it a 5/10 just because the demo didn’t have a Japanese language option and I assume there won’t be one in the full game. The English on most of the characters is pretty good until you get to Catherine and then you want to murder yourself.

I played the demo and it was hard. There wasn’t much thinking it was just no thinking and just think as you go. The enemy hand just comes up way too fast for you to even think of how to place the blocks. If you see a bunch of blocks, start pulling and see how it goes. Also there are some that makes block impossible to move/climb that messed me up pretty badly also = =;;

I’m not surprised that Game Informer gave the game a 70/100.
it *is* Game Informer after all, and Game Informer isn’t really so…..informed. Rather, their reviews are biased towards the “American in-crowd” games (CoD, Madden and such).

I’m seriously thinking about picking this up. I was kind of wary of the difficulty (Demons’ Souls was a game I liked the basics of, for instance, but I found myself too frustrated with how unforgiving it is to actually enjoy myself). If it’s more reasonable, though, it’s a definite buy.

I can’t agree entirely because Catherine’s controls are a bit touchy and some of the harder areas just looks extremely unfair and gives you very little time and room to work it out (especially if a boss is coming down on you at the same time).

It’s definitely pretty intense for a ‘puzzle’ game. It might be too difficult if they put in too much puzzle and pressure you with time limit and enemies attacking.

The question is whether or not “we” in the EU also get such a sexy Limited-Edition. At worst “we” get a US version without JP-Dub. Without anykind of extras and ’cause “we” are living in EU a game cost about 70€ ($100).

And aint that just pathetic on America side? It used to be that the Japanese companies would Increase the difficulties on their games for import.. Now since the nerds of the US can’t get it on, it’s Game Over if they don’t have INFINITE lives like all them fps games out now.

Get your facts straight anon. The Japanese game was patched for being mind numbingly difficult. They didn’t patch it FOR a US release. They patched it because it was fucking hard. The US just so happens to get that patched version.

The US gaming market as been so flooded with rehashes of “big burly guy in armor saves the universe/USA/hot chick” that anything different stands out.
The more unusual, the more odd, the more artistic, the more it acts like a refreshing change of pace (see braid, limbo, journey).

With that in mind, a US gamer would eat this kind of thing up alot more rabidly than a Japanese one.
Its difficulty just adds to the charm.

With that in mind, America isn’t the best in either as well so I don’t really see how the argument that the U.S is better is any more valid. Both still have their tops more or less in Asia even if it may not be held by Japan. Plus, to say that one group is better at Gaming on an overall by looking at specific Genres is extremely short-sighted considering different societies tend to have different genres having different. Otherwise you could very well say that Korea is only good at RTS because they’d go to the extent of declaring the release day of SC2 a holiday or that America is good at FPS games because that is all half their population plays.

Nice, they hold the strongest position in many different game genres and activities (like tetris and rubix cube solving), but because they may or may not be the RTS champions they’re “only good at fighting games” cool logic.

-They’d have to pay to license the Japanese voice track
-They would still need to do English acting because it’s rare that the average person would buy a video game only in Japanese
-The translations they do are not exact to the Japanese, but instead keep the feel and meaning of the lines; thus, the Japanese voices would not match up with what is being shown onscreen
-Space issues for same games (however, at the very least, PS3’s Catherine would not have this issue)
-Coding; unless they have a lot of manpower–and Atlus is a tiny company compared to others–it’s generally hard to code in a whole new dual-audio option when the original Japanese game doesn’t have it. One little change in the code could potentially change something completely unrelated.

Anyways, I don’t mind lack of dual audio, it’ll be nice, but not necessary.